Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

Music is an art form. It is a way to wordlessly communicate.

Music expresses what cannot be put into words I like to think, and I think the band makes a good go at it.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

I think music is another language.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Sometimes words are not needed, and the simplicity of expressing yourself through an art form is one of the best ways of communication.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

There's something in music that fascinates me - how it communicates emotion so immediately. That's something I wanted in my paintings.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Music is the way I talk to people.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

I make my music to express everything I feel is necessary to communicate at a given time. Through music, I can express myself with statements that are more nuanced and more contradictory than factual details.

The thing that makes me want to write a piece of music is having something to talk about, you know? Something I want to get across. Because I'm a composer, music is my first language, and that's what I reach for when I want to convey something.

Music is the highest form of communication.

There's a lot of different forms of communication, but music is absolutely the purest one.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.